The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić Read Free Book Online Page A

sported a Back Soon sign. I finally stopped trying to see Draaisma. The only living being I saw with any regularity was the plump Russian lecturer. She would be sitting at her desk behind a half-open door, moving her lips as if eating an invisible sandwich or reading something to herself.
    “Zdravstvuite,” she would say shyly if our eyes met.
     
    Only once did a colleague knock on my door.
    “May I come in?” he asked.
    “Please do,” I said.
    “So you’re our new colleague.”
    “You might say so.”
    The man held out his hand.
    “Glad to meet you. My name is Wim. Wim Hoeks. I teach Czech. Czech language and literature. Last door on the left.”
    I liked him immediately.
    “I wonder why Cees hasn’t introduced you to anybody.”
    “Oh, it’s probably because I’m here for only two semesters.”
    “So what? It would only have been right.”
    “I suppose it’s academic etiquette here.”
    “Well, we Dutch do take our time. It’s a few years before we invite anyone home. Privacy is a great excuse for all kinds of things, including this inexcusable rudeness. ‘It’s not that we’re unwilling; we just don’t want to impose.’”
    “Really?”
    “Welcome to the most hypocritical country on earth!” he said. “Now tell me, how are things going?”
    “Fine.”
    “And what are you teaching?”
    “For the time being I’m just getting to know the students.”
    “Miroslav Krleza is a great writer,” he said.
    “Your Czechs are no sluggards, either.”
    “What about the weather? Foreigners always beef about our weather.”
    “Well, it’s not the Caribbean, but…”
    “Aren’t you bored?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “Because this is the most boring country on earth!”
    “Isn’t that a bit contradictory?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “How can a country be both hypocritical and boring?”
    “Only Holland has that distinction.”
    “And I thought East Europeans were the masters of self-deprecation.”
    “No, that’s another of our distinctions. Only don’t let us fool you. We don’t mean it. We actually have the highest opinion of ourselves. It’s colonial arrogance. We’ve let the colonies go, but held on to the arrogance. You’ll see…”
    He glanced at his watch, stood up, and said, “Look, come and see me whenever you feel like it. We can go somewhere for coffee. Last door on the left, the smallest office on our floor. Yours is a lot bigger. You’re from the former Yugoslavia. You’re higher on the scale than us Czechs.”
    “In what sense?”
    “You’ve got nationalism, war, post-Communism. And we’re up to our necks in it all at the Hague.”
    “Unfortunately.”
    “And what a wonderful country it was! Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen! I’ll never understand how it happened.”
    “You don’t think I do.”
    “Of course not…. But when you stick a knife in somebody’s stomach, you raise such a racket that the whole world knows. We do it on the q.t. We don’t want people to know, and even our victims are grateful…. But we’ll talk again. Glad to have met you.”
    He started off, then turned back at the door.
    “That island off the Dalmatian coast foreigners can never pronounce….”
    “Krk.”
    “Right. Does the name mean ‘neck’?”
    “Neck? No. ‘Neck’ is vrat . Why do you ask?”
    “Because that’s what it means in Czech. And Czechs like to torture foreigners with the sentence Strprst skrz krk .”
    “And what does that mean?”
    “‘Stick your finger through your neck,’” he laughed, giving a demonstration on himself. Then, with a wave, he turned again and strode down the corridor.
     
    The fifth floor was always so deserted that I gave up feeling like a stowaway. I also gave up asking the secretary questions and knocking at Draaisma’s door. I did, however, pop in on Wim three times. His office was in fact smaller than mine. Each time he told me he happened to be very busy, and each time he pressed a signed offprint